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A review by giorgiawessels
Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey by Isabel Fonseca
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.0
Wow, what a read! I didn’t know *anything* about the Romani (except for the gypsy character Esméralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and even when we were learning about Nazi Germany during my school years, of course there was no mention of the Romani either.
I went into this book without the knowledge or expectations and it did not disappoint! It was very insightful and well-researched. It’s not a fun read per se but still extremely interesting and informative, and what made it even more enjoyable was that I am currently in North Macedonia and Ohrid, both of which were mentioned in the book.
I loved the more personal stories, especially about the people of Kinostudio, and their way of life - I found myself smiling a couple of times. The family is quite big so I made notes on my phone so as to remember who everyone is!
Almost 30 years since Bury Me Standing has been published, I found the book still very fascinating and intellectual. I would just have liked to know why the author went on this exploration and what her backstory is. It reads more like a piece of journalism and much much less like a memoir.
Some snippets:
“Nostalgia is the essence of Gypsy song, and seems always to have been. But nostalgia for what? Nostos is the Greek for “a return home”; the Gypsies have no home, and, perhaps uniquely among peoples, they have no dream of a homeland. Utopia—ou topos—means “no place.” Nostalgia for Utopia: a return home to no place. O lungo drom. The long road.”
“Even at home I was never allowed to be alone: not ever (and not even to use the bathroom, but that was because there wasn’t one). The Dukas did not share gadjo notions of or need for privacy. Or for quiet. The more and the noisier the better was their creed—one that I found to be universal among Roma. Their conception of a lone person was invariably a Rom who for some infraction had been recognized as mahrime, unclean, and had been excluded from the group. There was something wrong with you, some shame, if you had to be alone. The Gypsies have endured unimaginable hardships, but one could be sure that loneliness wasn’t one of them.”
“And so we see that the term Rom, as in Romany, has nothing whatever to do with Romania, where, confusingly, the Gypsies have lived in great numbers for many centuries. Nor is it, as English Gypsies told the social anthropologist Judith Okely, “cos we always roam.”) Rom, dom, and lom are all in phonetic correspondence with the Sanskrit domba and the Modern Indian dom or dum, which refer to a particular group of tribes who may look familiar. In Sanskrit domba means “man of low caste living by singing and music.”
I went into this book without the knowledge or expectations and it did not disappoint! It was very insightful and well-researched. It’s not a fun read per se but still extremely interesting and informative, and what made it even more enjoyable was that I am currently in North Macedonia and Ohrid, both of which were mentioned in the book.
I loved the more personal stories, especially about the people of Kinostudio, and their way of life - I found myself smiling a couple of times. The family is quite big so I made notes on my phone so as to remember who everyone is!
Almost 30 years since Bury Me Standing has been published, I found the book still very fascinating and intellectual. I would just have liked to know why the author went on this exploration and what her backstory is. It reads more like a piece of journalism and much much less like a memoir.
Some snippets:
“Nostalgia is the essence of Gypsy song, and seems always to have been. But nostalgia for what? Nostos is the Greek for “a return home”; the Gypsies have no home, and, perhaps uniquely among peoples, they have no dream of a homeland. Utopia—ou topos—means “no place.” Nostalgia for Utopia: a return home to no place. O lungo drom. The long road.”
“Even at home I was never allowed to be alone: not ever (and not even to use the bathroom, but that was because there wasn’t one). The Dukas did not share gadjo notions of or need for privacy. Or for quiet. The more and the noisier the better was their creed—one that I found to be universal among Roma. Their conception of a lone person was invariably a Rom who for some infraction had been recognized as mahrime, unclean, and had been excluded from the group. There was something wrong with you, some shame, if you had to be alone. The Gypsies have endured unimaginable hardships, but one could be sure that loneliness wasn’t one of them.”
“And so we see that the term Rom, as in Romany, has nothing whatever to do with Romania, where, confusingly, the Gypsies have lived in great numbers for many centuries. Nor is it, as English Gypsies told the social anthropologist Judith Okely, “cos we always roam.”) Rom, dom, and lom are all in phonetic correspondence with the Sanskrit domba and the Modern Indian dom or dum, which refer to a particular group of tribes who may look familiar. In Sanskrit domba means “man of low caste living by singing and music.”